Tis nearly the season to be jolly well scared

I’m happy to report that my Christmas e-collection, IN A DEEP, DARK DECEMBER is now available to purchase. All one needs to do is follow the link.

I put this lot together especially for release this Christmas. It contains five festive terror tales, and to whet your whistles, so to speak - assuming you enjoy the occasional seasonal chiller - here is a sample from each one:

Arrayed along its sill there was snowman jazz band, each figure about a foot tall, all with the usual carrot noses and brass button eyes, but also wearing boaters and striped blazers; one carried a banjo, the other a saxophone, while the third was seated behind a drum kit. It was true, Tookey reflected. Anyone who could afford all this could afford to miss out on a few presents.

 "Tookey, move your arse, yeah!" Spazzer said. Tookey made to go over and join him, but glanced first at the snowman jazz band, all of whose heads were turned towards him. He felt certain they hadn’t been that way a minute ago.

… from The Christmas Toys

Arthur had to slam the brakes on, sending the car into a ten-metre skid (thank God they'd only been crawling). When they stopped, he stared blankly at the road ahead. It appeared to fork. Faintly visible through the swirls of snowflakes, two minor tracks led off in opposite directions. There was no signpost on view.  

Puzzled, he dug into the glove compartment to check the map. But unfortunately it was now too dark inside the car to read the wretched thing. When he put the interior light on, it affected little more than a dull glow, and his eyes weren't up to the rigors of scanning a crumpled, coffee-stained page on which the roads were squiggles and the names of the few settlements in this region printed so small that they'd be difficult to pick out with a magnifying glass. Arthur glanced through the window again. Whiteout conditions persisted, and night was now falling properly.

... from The Faerie

It was only a little better on the next floor, where dim bulbs revealed another long passage, large patches of naked brick exposed where the plaster had rotted away. He regarded its numerous doorways helplessly; some were closed, some open. None gave any clue as to whether he’d find a bed inside them, though clearly there was someone else up here – because a whistling 'smack', the sound of a short, sharp impact, sounded from somewhere close by.

 Several more such impacts sounded at regular intervals, and Capstick almost blundered over the edge of another staircase, even narrower, darker and steeper than the first – the ‘back staircase’ he supposed – before he finally traced their source to the door at the landing’s farthest, dimmest end. When he pushed this one open, frigid streetlight filtering through a tall window revealed what looked like a long-disused schoolroom …

… from Midnight Service

Much of the varnish was now dirty and yellowed, but through it the deeply-troubled visage of Hugh Holker was still visible; an elderly man with sagging jowls, a heavily furrowed brow and thick grey tufts for sideburns. Phil had been in to look at the picture several times already, and still found it compelling. The artist had depicted Holker leaning forward on his fist, in a posture of dignified contemplation, but had etched despair and even fear into the final composition. The old industrialist’s eyes bore a stark quality, as if some ghastly apparition had just materialised before him. In the background meanwhile there were indistinct mist-forms, swirls and eddies of smoke or fog, which might have had more to do with the picture’s age than the artist’s intent, but which were ominously obscure all the same.

… from The Mummers

... of all the Father Christmases Ruth had ever seen – and some of them had been pretty odious (bored pensioners in cheap department store grottoes, drunks in fancy dress fighting in town centres) – there was something especially sinister about this one: in particular his face, or rather his lack of face. The dense red beard was attached to a papier-mâché mask. Whoever had made it, had tried their best to fulfill the Christmas fantasy: the fat, apple-red cheeks; the large, bent nose; the bushy eyebrows; the broad, grinning mouth. But putting all these together, there was something about it that wasn’t quite right.

 Possibly the eyes.

 These were holes through which the person beneath could look, but to Ruth they were empty sockets, menacing slits with only darkness behind them.

… from The Killing Ground

As long as I’ve been writing scary stories, I’ve put pen to paper around autumn time, as the Christmas spirit began slowly to grow on me, to create what I hoped would be festive spook fare. I now have many such tales in my locker, most of which have already been published in one shape or another, though several others still sit on the drawing board in an as yet undeveloped state – so I’m hopeful there will be more to follow.

This is an old custom, of course, possibly made most famous by MR James (pictured above) during his famous Christmas Eve readings at King’s College, though it predates that considerably. Even in the pre-Christian era, the midwinter festival was traditionally the time for ceremonial gatherings and instructive stories, people grouping nervously around blazing fires as the ice and darkness swallowed the world they knew – not just for safety and company, but for spiritual strength, seeking to commune with their gods and spirits, and interact with deceased ancestors who might bring advice or warnings from beyond.

Many modern horror writers have willingly tapped into the magic and mystery of the Christmas season. I mean, anyone who fancies having a go at this, me included, is in excellent company to say the very least.

Some of my favourite horrific and supernatural tales have been set at this splendid time of year. Robert Bloch’s THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Stephen Gallagher’s TO DANCE BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON, Lanyon Jones’s A DICKENSIAN CHRISTMAS, Anton Chekov’s THE CROOKED MIRROR and Ramsey Campbell’s two unforgettable excursions into yuletide horror, THE CHIMNEY and THE DECORATIONS, are among the very best, while Charles Dickens’s THE SIGNAL-MAN and Sheridan Le Fanu’s SCHALKEN THE PAINTER, while not specifically set at Christmas, are traditionally dusted off each December thanks firstly to the former being first published in the Christmas edition of ALL THE YEAR ROUND in 1866, but mainly to the marvelous BBC television adaptations of these tales as 'Ghost Stories for Christmas' way back in 1976 and 1979 respectively (I purloined the tortured face higher up on the left from the latter).

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On a slightly different note, this week I was the happy recipient of DEAD MAN WALKING, the fourth novel in my DS Heckenbug series. These are my own author copies, I have to say … the title still only gets published in its complete form on November 20.

(By the way, pictured just below here, is the cover image of DIE JAGD, which is the German version of a short story of mine, THE CHASE, first published as an ebook by Harper last year).

It’s early days yet of course, but thus far DEAD MAN WALKING has largely acquired five-star reviews on GOODREADS (sorry – just thought I’d drop that in). But just to prove that the work never stops at this end, the next novel in the Heck series, HUNTED (due to be published on May 7^th next year), left my keyboard last Friday afternoon, having been written and proofed. It now commences the trek around the HarperCollins copyediting desks. What can I say except that I await its return with baited breath.

The blizzard pic used much further up is by Tony-DarkGrave.

Ahh, the Lake District - so lovely, so lethal!

Writers are often asked where they get their inspiration from. It's a time-honoured question which crops up again and again. And yet there is never an easy answer. In my own case, there are lots of different sources: other works of literature, movies, plays, historical events, myths, people I know, incidents that befell them, incidents that have befallen me.

But also … places. We all have our own special place, I think. Somewhere we can kick back and relax, but by the same token where the creative juices really flow (every writer I know will tell you that he/she is never really off duty), where the influence of the environment is hugely beneficial to your thought processes.

In my case, if you haven’t already guessed – it’s the Lake District in northwest England.

This is not just the place where my wife, Cathy was born, or the venue for countless happy family holidays going back to my earliest years, it’s also one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth and one of England’s wildest. In addition it is riddled with folklore and legend (hence this very famous old book on the right, by Gerald Findler).

All my tick-boxes can be found in the Lake District.

So perhaps it was only a matter of time before Mark Heckenburg found his way there. For anyone who doesn’t know, DS Heckenburg, or Heck, is my current police hero, and the star character in four novels: STALKERS, SACRIFICE, THE KILLING CLUB and due out next month, DEAD MAN WALKING (the imaginative press package for which is pictured at the top of this column). 

And it’s the latter of these that concerns us today, because though it starts out in Devon, on Dartmoor – another idyllic National Park here in England – DEAD MAN WALKING very quickly transports us north to the Lake District, 885 square miles of mountains, lakes, windswept moors and fathomless forests.

While the Lakes can literally be a paradise on Earth in summer, in the deep autumn, particularly a late-November thick with frost and murky with mist, the endless woods and fells can suddenly feel lonely, desolate, cold; even life-threatening. 

And let’s make no bones about it; lives will be under threat in this book, because Heck, now marooned in the Lake District after the tumultuous events at the end of THE KILLING CLUB, finds himself isolated by these conditions and at the same time grappling with a series of ghastly murders, which may be the work of a truly monstrous killer long thought dead …

But enough of that, the purpose of this blogpost is not to snitch spoilers about the new book. It’s to introduce some of the real life locations I use in it, even though in the actual text they are transported to other corners of the Lake District and are given fictional names.

Above, you see one of my favourite places on the entire planet, the Lodore Falls, which pour down from the dizzy heights of the Shepherd’s Crag into Derwentwater, and in full flood, as shown here, are one of the most spectacular sights in the north of England.

Think you could take a boat down there?

Would you fancy trying it if your life depended on it?

In DEAD MAN WALKING we have the Cragwood Race. If you ever need to picture what it looks like, or where the idea came from, look no further than the image overhead.

Witch Cradle Tarn doesn’t exist in real life, even though in DEAD MAN WALKING it is high in the Langdale Pikes: a small, secluded lake popular with walkers and climbers but quiet for much of the year. It is very deep and very dark, and hemmed on its east side by the rugged scree-cluttered skirts of Fiend’s Fell and a few sparse fringes of pinewood. Check out Buttermere here, the original model for this fictional place, a famously pristine and yet eerily still and mysterious body of water.

The shot below is one which sadly I can’t claim as my own. I’ve no idea who took this atmospheric pic. I found it floating around on the internet. If the original photographer would like to get in touch, I’ll happily credit him/her, or if he/she is so inclined, will take it down. I think it depicts one of the quarry paths above the colossal Honister Pass. 

But whatever it is, here is the origin of the ominous Cradle Track, which hopefully will loom large and menacing in your mind before you’re halfway through DEAD MAN WALKING.

… for some reason Hazel could never fathom, climbers and fell-walkers traversing this route in the past had chosen particularly hefty shards of slate, some of them three or four feet in length, and had then used smaller pieces to prop them upright on both sides of the path – usually every hundred yards or so. What they were supposed to be – distance-markers, or even some variety of crude outdoor art – she never knew, but the illusion they created was of gravestones. Or, if one of the largest ones, some were maybe as tall as five or six feet, suddenly loomed from the fog, of malformed figures standing close by.

On the subject of the Honister Pass, I did shoot this next one, which portrays the road leading down from the top of the pass to Gatesgarth. It’s not the kind of road you’d like to drive hell for leather along, particularly if you were chasing someone, but that never usually stops Heck. Here’s a tip, if you read the book think of this one when you think of Cragwood Road.

That said, the new book isn’t all high melodrama; we aren’t constantly concerned here with soaring rocks and tumbling whitewater. Cragwood Vale, otherwise known as ‘the Cradle’, is like so many locations in the Lake District: danger may lurk in its vicinity but it’s never less than stunningly picturesque. In real life, the Lake District valley I based it on was this one, Borrowdale, a place of dreams.

Of course, a holiday is only ever as good as your billet. The preferred option for my family has often been the LODORE HOTEL (pictured left). I first stayed here as a child in 1967, and we’ve been going back ever since. No, I’m not going to tell you The Lodore appears in DEAD MAN WALKING; Cragwood Vale isn’t quite so grand (though it has a belting pub in The Witch’s Kettle, and I'm sure that boat club looks familiar), but this hotel has influenced me in other writerly ways.

It was here in the early 1970s, where I spent one particular family holiday that has become a landmark in my life. You see that comfortable lounge on the right? Well, it was once the Lodore shop.

I know … astonishing, isn’t it? That’s the kind of quirky thing country hotels did back in those days; they offered quality stuff for sale on their own premises. This particular shop sold Lakeland crafts (obviously), but also books. And not just map-books or guides to the fells. It sold anthologies, and wait for this because it gets even better … it sold horror anthologies.

I know what you’re thinking. Was this place real, or a glimpse of Heaven?

Anyway, it was in this very shop where I bought my first Pan Horror (vols 8-16, if my faded memory serves). But not only that, it sold all 10 volumes of the original TALES OF TERROR series, as edited by the late great R. Chetwynd-Hayes for Mary Danby at Fontana.

Again, memory fades a little, but I think the four I was able to afford at the time were Welsh Tales of Wales, Scottish Tales of Terror, Irish Tales of Terror and Cornish Tales of Terror. With their distinctive artwork, their high quality and yet unbelievably scary stories penned by such master and mistresses of dark fiction as Arthur Machen, Sean O’Casey, Dorothy K. Haynes and Daphne du Maurier, and their insistence on interspersing these fictional tales with snippets of real, genuinely spooky folklore – all with an aggressively local flavour, these books made an indelible impression on me.

There and then, long before I knew I wanted to be an author, I knew I had to do something like this. Evening after evening rolled past during that best holiday ever, and while the older members of my extensive family all got uproariously drunk in the hotel’s excellent restaurant, and then the bar and lounge, I was quite content to sit by the fireplace in that little nook next to the shop, and read my Tales Of Terror, absolutely convinced (though uncertain why) that at some point in the future I was going to revisit this theme, but not confine it to 10 titles, in fact to do as many as possible, covering the whole of the British Isles and maybe beyond.

Thanks to GRAY FRIAR PRESS, I’ve now edited seven volumes in my own TERROR TALES series, but it’s surely no surprise that the very first, published in 2011, was TERROR TALES OF THE LAKE DISTRICT.

Waiting for another Deep, Dark December

Here's something that may be of interest to fans of festive ghost and horror stories. IN A DEEP, DARK DECEMBER will be my Christmas e-offering later this year. This is just an early heads-up because though the book is finished, it isn't available even for pre-order at this stage. It's a collection of five festive chillers, all reprints though most will be new to many readers, all with a strong flavour of Christmas (but not too much good cheer, I hasten to add). We're aiming to have this one available for download via Amazon hopefully from mid-November onwards, but keep checking this space, where I'll post regular progress reports. The awesome cover is by the ever reliable NEIL WILLIAMS. For those interested, the stories contained therein comprise the following:

The Christmas Toys: Two Christmas Eve burglars discover the dark side of the festive spirit …

Midnight Service: A marooned Christmas traveller seeks refuge in the town’s old workhouse …

The Mummers: A seasonal revenge plot doesn’t take account of a mysterious Yuletide troupe …

The Faerie: Fleeing his tyrannical wife, a nervous man gets lost in a fearsome December blizzard …

The Killing Ground: Man and wife PIs take a Christmas break to protect a movie star and his family from the cannibal fiend believed to haunt their new country estate …

On the subject of short, scary stories, I can happily announce that the latest paperback in our TERROR TALES range, TERROR TALES OF YORKSHIRE is now available for order. You can have it for £8.99 either from AMAZON or from GRAY FRIAR PRESS themselves.

For those new to this series, chilling and inexplicable real-life incidents are interspersed with original works of terrifying Yorkshire fiction from such horror luminaries as Mark Morris, Stephen Laws, Alison Littlewood, Simon Clark and Mark Chadbourn.

And as a little extra treat in the midst of another drab, grey October, here is a quick appetiser for the next book in the Terror Tales series, TERROR TALES OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS, which will be out next spring. Again, keep checking in.

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Now for something slightly different. My next Heck novel, DEAD MAN WALKING, is due for publication next month, and there is quite a bit of chat online about it. Therefore, this might be an appropriate time to resurrect another guest-blog I wrote at the time of the last Heck novel's publication - which was THE KILLING CLUB, last May. 

The piece below originally appeared on the blog, CRIME THRILLER GIRL, and was penned in response to questions about the influences in my career to date and my favourite other authors, novels etc. Hope you find it an interesting read: 

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It would be very easy, I suppose, to respond to the question which books have you read that were most influential on your career, and, given that my own most successful novels are intense murder investigations, simply reel off all the great thriller writers. 

It would of course be untrue to say that I haven’t been influenced by other thriller novelists. Stuart MacBride, Mark Billingham, Peter James, Kathy Reichs and Katia Lief are all staggeringly high in my estimation. But I don’t just read within my own genre, and I think it would be an interesting exercise to perhaps consider those other types of books that have blown me away, set me on my current career path, whatever you want to call it.

It’s no secret that, before I began writing my DS Heckenburg thrillers, I dabbled widely in the fields of horror and fantasy. And this wasn’t just during my formative years as a writer, my kindergarten if you like; I wrote lots of this kind of stuff, and still do. I also read in this field enormously. But it’s fascinating now, on reflection, how much these apparently unrelated interests have influenced my DS Heckenburg novels.

For example, THE WOLFEN by Whitley Strieber (pub. 1978) presents us with two tired New York detectives, a man and a woman, investigating the murder and apparent cannibalisation of hobos in the city’s underbelly, and soon reaching the conclusion the perpetrators are not humans, but a highly intelligent werewolf pack.

Now, I suppose there are obvious links here with ‘Heck’: a gang of vicious and relentless killers, a lovelorn boy and girl cop team, and so on. But I think it’s the seamy side of the average detective’s working day that most caught my eye about this striking novel. Strieber really takes us to the backside of New York, the subways and ghettos and derelict lots, and peoples them with hookers, winos and druggies. My own experience as a real life cop taught me these are the places you need to go if you want to catch some bad guys, but here we go way beyond the everyday grim, delving into the world of the true urban gothic: it’s a nightmare landscape, beautifully and poetically described, and yet at the same time filled with such palpable menace that even hardboiled detectives are unnerved.

I make a point of never taking my own crime thrillers into such realms of overt fantasy, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t try to invoke similar feelings of dread and weirdness in the dark heart of the city.

Another relevant horror novel is surely LEGION by William Peter Blatty (pub. 1983). This is a totally different kind of police story. Again, it follows a time-served detective investigating a series of sadistic murders, though in this case he’s dealing with Satanic ritual. It’s a much subtler tale, ripe with a sense of ancient mystery and slow-burning evil (and that would be real evil, of the distinctly inhuman variety). Yet for all this, the point where LEGION really kicks in is the deep assessment the hero, Lt. Kinderman, constantly makes of himself, examining his own beliefs or unbeliefs, puzzling as to why he exposes himself to this depravity time and again, bleeding inside for the victims. Not exactly Heck, who’s never been much of a philosopher, but the longer you work as a homicide cop, the more you’re going to confront yourself with these issues. There is some really deep character work here by Blatty, which you can’t help but admire.

Moving from horror into science fiction and fantasy, there are two other titles I’d like to mention. 

The first of these contains the most obvious link to those matters I’ve mentioned previously. It is Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi masterwork, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP (pub. 1968). Most folk will know this as the movie, BLADE RUNNER, but though there are some similarities, the book goes way beyond the limited scope of a Hollywood adaptation. In Rick Deckard, another dogged man-hunter and, thanks to his wife’s depression, a sad loner, working his way through a world gone mad and yet adding to it with his own role, which conflicts him deeply, there is genuine pathos. The movie, of course, had a strong noirish feel – it was almost Chandleresque – which is not prevalent in the book, but the strong central character is still a great blueprint for the fictional lone-wolf detective. For me, heroes always need to be vulnerable: stricken by self-doubt, and with enemies on all sides, some of whom they thought were friends. I’ve never had much time for men of steel, undefeatable icons of hunky machismo, like Superman or Batman. If I took anything from DO ANDROIDS DREAM … it had to be that deep introspection, that guilt, that conscience. It makes our heroes so much more interesting. 

On that same subject, the fantasy novel I’d like to nominate is GRENDEL by John Gardner (pub. 1971). I guess we’re all familiar with the tale of Beowulf, the Viking warrior, and his defence of the hall of Heorot against the ravages of the faceless devil, Grendel, who for no reason other than twisted pleasure, came nightly to slaughter the innocent.

As I say, I’m not big on superhero stories. I loved BEOWULF as a kid – it was probably the first spooky tale my late father told me – but as I grew up, I found the monster more interesting. I mean, let’s not kid ourselves, Grendel is the prototype serial killer. So in many ways, GRENDEL the novel takes us to the other end of the crime thriller spectrum, Gardner depicting his antihero first as an abused and lonely child, later showing him suffer rejection by those he sought to befriend, and finally having him retaliate with homicidal fury, which at last introduces him to a lifestyle of his liking – if he can’t have everyone’s love, he’ll have their terror. There isn’t as much Norse myth woven into this novel as you might expect. Instead Gardner gives us philosophy, social commentary and, a decade before the FBI commenced offender profiling, the psychology of the reviled. Talk about streets ahead of the game. Of course, we all know what happens at the end of BEOWULF, and it’s the same in GRENDEL, so don’t expect any surprises – apart from the dark joy this narrative will elicit as it works its way through the tormented mind and hideous satisfactions of a creature driven solely to hate.

It’s a strange thing that we think we know ourselves so well, our thoughts, interests and aspirations. And yet clearly there are many subliminal strata to our thinking. Even as I wrote this blog, it became more apparent to me how relevant to my current writing so many of these themes explored by earlier authors actually are. I won’t go over them again, because I think they speak for themselves – they certainly will, I hope, if you get the chance to read any of my DS Heckenburg thrillers, STALKERS, SACRIFICE or, most recently, THE KILLING CLUB. On which note, I suspect it’s a good time to end this monologue. Whichever way you go, please enjoy your reading and writing. There are no finer pleasures.

How to create terror, tension and suspense

Here's an item I wrote for my blog tour last spring, in anticipation of THE KILLING CLUB's imminent publication. I can't quite remember now which site it appeared on, but for this article I was specifically asked to offer tips to writers looking to create tension, terror, suspense, etc. A few months have gone since then, but hopefully this advice, such as it is, will still be of some use (plus DEAD MAN WALKING is due to hit the shelves next month, so with luck this will be a timely retread). If anyone hasn't already read this piece, it might be of interest:

One of the things my thriller writing has won most praise for is its creation of terror and suspense. If true, this obviously works in my favour: I’m a career writer, thrillers are my forte, and thrillers wouldn’t be thrillers if they weren’t able to keep their audiences on the edges of their seats.

But how do you go about doing this? How do you make your readers too frightened to turn the page but at the same time desperate to know what happens next?

Well … I can only respond by outlining my own experience and process.

The reality is that, as with any mood a writer is seeking to evoke – be it romance, mystery, comedy – you need to work on it thoughtfully, and construct it with attention to detail. Sometimes of course you get lucky and stumble on scenarios that are tense and frightening simply because they are. But most of the time it doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to remember that your readers aren’t privy to your innermost fears and doubts, so a lot of the time situations you happen to find discomforting won’t have the same effect on them; it’s basically about leaving nothing to chance - the masters of the form never do.

Stephen King’s chilling short story, The Ledge, tells the tale of an ordinary man who falls foul of the mob and is forced to walk around the exterior of a skyscraper penthouse along a seven-inch shelf. It’s a nightmare scenario by any standards, but King works it for everything he can, page after page, ensuring we are with this guy each foot of the way, experiencing his every near-slip, his every stab of pain as pigeons peck at his ankles.

For the sheer stress it puts the reader through, this is one of the great pieces of thriller fiction. It is literally exhausting to read it. But what are the ingredients of successful scenes like this? Well, there are four essential boxes I always feel I need to tick.

Character.

Threat.

Situation.

Atmosphere.

In terms of character, it’s never going to work if the readers don’t like your protagonist. By that, I don’t mean you have to like them, as in make them someone you’d enjoy going on a dinner date with. You can be repelled by them; they can be thoroughly objectionable. But they’ve got to be real, someone whose personality and motivations are clear and accessible, otherwise it won’t be possible for the reader to invest emotionally in their fate.

Now, if the characters concerned are central figures in your book or script, this is probably going to happen anyway because you’ll have had plenty time to develop them. However, many characters in thriller and horror writing are short-lived. These are the victims, the guys in red shirts who always go down to the planet surface in the Star Trek landing party so they can serve the purpose of being killed while Kirk and Spock get away. Those faceless he-men in red shirts worked fine back in those days because it was all so new. Trust me, it wouldn’t be so effective now – audiences are more sophisticated.

If your character is to be short-lived, a victim just waiting to get the chop, you’ve still got to give him or her a back-story. I don’t mean you should overload it chapter on chapter, but take a little time to give us a glimpse of their humanity. They may have a spouse waiting for them, they may have kids at home, they may be struggling at work, or to find work – above all, they have feelings, they can be hurt.

All this makes them much easier to sympathise with and root for.

And they don’t have to be overtly vulnerable. A confused OAP or a lost child will always win your readers’ vote; it’s easy to fear for them. But look at John Boorman’s movie, Deliverance, in which the heroes were four red-blooded guys on an outdoors adventure, and yet we got to know them so well that we empathised with them hugely as they fought desperately for survival.

(And this is another thing. Don’t be frightened to strip your characters down to their raw emotions. Think of the impact the opening scene in Jaws had, when the poor lass, whilst under attack by the shark, screamed hoarsely for God to help her. It’s a tragic and frightening scene even today, the sight of this modern, free-spirited girl plunged into this nightmare of nightmares from which she instinctively knows there’ll be no escape – don’t be afraid to upset your readers; that’s what they’ve bought your book for).

With regard to threat, this will be the keystone of your thriller anyway.

I’m not here to tell you how to create a great villain; that’s an art-form in itself. And you certainly won’t need me to advise you about scenarios of indescribable horror; they are around us all day, on news bulletins. I will say this – whether your threat be a person, an animal, a supernatural entity, or an everyday predicament – you can’t make it too terrible.

Remember how this works. You’re asking your readers to follow these characters they now know and love, as they walk unwittingly into peril. 

The readers, of course, will have an idea what’s going to happen because you’ve prepared the ground for them, but shout and scream though they may, the characters can’t hear them. And yet this intense experience is only going to occur if the menace is real and tangible. So for example, in Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black (the British TV version of which is pictured right), if Arthur Kipps was being forced to spend time alone at Eel Marsh House and there was lots of mist around and he felt very isolated – sure, it would be spooky. But how much more spooky is it when the audience know in advance that this house is the abode of a hateful spirit that will seek to destroy him?

Yet, while I say don’t be shy about making your threat monstrous, that doesn’t mean you can’t be subtle as well. In fact, subtlety can raise the stakes dramatically – and this lesson goes back to the earliest days of thriller writing. In the poem Beowulf, which dates to the 6^th century, the monster Grendel is never physically described; it is simply an unstoppable something that comes out of the darkness, and on one occasion leaves 30 butchered victims. That you don’t know what it looks like – in other words you can’t mentally quantify the nature of the menace, despite the carnage it leaves behind – is all the more terrifying. And there are myriad examples of this in modern times, from the classic opening 30 minutes of the sci-fi horror Them! in 1954, when we’ve no idea what murdered the family in the camper fan and left the little girl deranged, to the modern serial killer thriller, Se7en (1995) when the detectives battle haplessly with a faceless madman who is always streets ahead of them.

Conversely, in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal novels, we know full well what Hannibal Lector looks like and who he is, but his urbane charm is utterly disorienting – this smiling villain is surely too nice to be capable of such horrors, yet we know from the outset that he isn’t. With a simple look across the dinner table, this guy can freeze the blood.

To sum up, your menace doesn’t have to come in shouting and roaring – you don’t even have to see it – but it has to be immense. Believe me, your readership can take as much as you can give them, and will thank you all the more for it.

The next tick-box is situation.

That may sound as if it speaks for itself. But the important element here is believability. To a certain extent, this may already by driven by one of our previous criteria: character. If the readers empathise with your characters you can get away with almost anything. Dr Who is a great example. The Doctor visits the most outlandish locations and faces scenarios which, even in sci-fi terms, verge on the completely ridiculous, yet the audience has bought so much into his character that even the most unlikely threats seem plausible.

That said, an audience’s familiarity with an environment will never hurt. One of our great crime novels, Jack’s Return Home, by Ted Lewis, is set in Scunthorpe of all places, a working class town with which many British readers were easily able to identify, but in which the gangster-infested pool halls and massage parlours suddenly seemed a public nuisance rather than a common backdrop to urban life. When Mike Hodges adapted it as Get Carter! in 1971, he shifted it to the even more grimly picturesque city of Newcastle, and how effective was that? The land of tower blocks and dark Satanic mills – previously in British cinema the home of kitchen-sink dramas – was suddenly tailor-made for the crime thriller medium. However, it’s equally important that your characters are in these environments for convincing reasons. In Jack’s Return Home, Jack Carter is an underworld figure from the get-go, heading north to investigate the death of his brother, which brings him into direct conflict with the local firms. No British crime reader was going to query that.

In another British crime novel of that era, The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (later adapted by Sam Peckinpah as Straw Dogs, left), an intellectual couple in an isolated house on the scenic Cornish moors fall foul of a local mob when they seek to protect a sex-offender – that is a disturbingly realistic scenario, which is even more likely to happen in real life now than it was then. 

Not to labour this point, but I’m going to break one of my own rules now, and tell you something I think you shouldn’t do rather than something you should. Modern thriller narratives are traditionally filled with moments of idiocy by the characters, a device often used to move the plot along. For example, there’s a killer out there, so what do the characters do? – they split up. Or how about they hear strange and terrifying noises – and go and investigate. As I mentioned earlier, modern audiences are a bit too sophisticated for that, and if a situation is too unbelievable or contrived, it will result in sniggers rather than screams.

So, by all means, put them in scary predicaments, but authenticity is, and always will be, the key to making your readers feel the danger themselves.

Lastly, but possibly most important of all, is atmosphere. And in some ways this is the hardest to pin down, because we tend to have preconceived notions about it.

For example, a haunted house is only going to be scary if it has gargoyles on its eaves and cobwebs in its windows. A high crime district is only going to be believable if it has gang tags on its wall and syringes in the gutters. Okay, all that kind of window-dressing may be important, but I don’t think it’s essential. Let me give you two different examples.

A pleasant coastal resort and the open road. Couldn’t be less threatening, right?

Wrong.

In Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), Summer Isle is a beautiful Scottish island with a picture postcard village around its harbour. But that doesn’t prevent you suspecting something awful is going to happen as various odd aspects of the place slowly emerge to invoke a sense of evil. 

In Richard Matheson’s breath-taking short story, Duel (as filmed by Stephen Spielberg, left), the setting is a sun-drenched motorway. Normal enough, except that this one is eerily empty – apart from our tired travelling salesman and the dirty old truck that unrelentingly teases and tortures him, in which scenario the sheer monotony of the long, deserted blacktop, the mere appearance of which saps hope and energy, becomes as much a foe as the maniac in the rear.

So it’s not so much the locations, as how they look, feel, and pluck at the nerves of your embattled characters.

A project relying on suspense will only benefit from an atmosphere that makes its protagonists feel vulnerable and oppresses the readers. In purely technical terms, there are lots of ways you can achieve this: geographically (a tiny army base at the North Pole; a beleaguered police station in the riot zone); meteorologically (snow, ice, fog); even architecturally (an urban ghetto full of faceless buildings and derelict subways, where the unseen attack could come from any direction). However you do it, the key is creating a sense of isolation, strangeness and menace, in which your characters feel small and insecure.

So, at the end of the day … is that it? Is that how do you evoke tension, fear, suspense?

Sadly, no.

These can only be basic guidelines. To write effective suspense, you’ve still got to tauten your narrative and bring pace to your prose. This is equally important to any of the above, if not more so. One quick way to achieve this is to read your finished scenes onto tape, and play them back. If they sound laborious and slow, that’s probably because they are – in which case don’t be frightened to wield the hatchet, slicing out every bit of text that doesn’t serve the purpose of creating tension. Save your lovely descriptions and your characters’ thought processes for parts of the book that don’t rely on nerve-shredding terror, because the last thing you want to do at that stage is slow it all down.

Just a few thoughts here. Not by any means the whole story, but one or two ideas which, on the whole, seem to work for me, and which others, with luck, will find useful and interesting.

Happy writing.

Witchcraft, woodland devils and a big loss

Quite a few bits and bobs to chat about this week.

I’m very happy to report that THE POPPET, a short story of mine, first published in 2012, has now been given the audio treatment by WHOLE STORY AUDIOBOOKS, as read by Jonathan Keeble, and can be purchased from Amazon, either as a freestanding CD (running time approx. one hour), or by download.

Anyway, here’s the official blurb from the back of it:

The story of the Cumbrian witches in the small village of Bleaberry Beck, is told in hushed tones and with a quiet reverence that speaks of superstition and fear. Richard Henderson, Medieval Studies student at Oxford University, couldn't be less intrigued. Picking up a 'poppet' from the village shop, he happily sets off home with this birthday present for his little sister. But the faceless wooden doll holds the secret to a chilling curse.

And here, for your delectation, is a quick snippet from the story itself:

Not a single doll in that shop-window – and I scanned it from top to bottom – had a face. And I don’t just mean that a face hadn’t been carved; I mean that it hadn’t even been drawn. Where their faces ought to be there were blank patches of shiny, varnished wood. Perhaps if I’d passed something like this in a city shop-window – maybe one or two such objects among a variety of other, friendlier-looking toys – it wouldn’t have struck me as strange. But on this occasion, because it was the whole story, I’d been quite taken aback – at least on first seeing it. But as I say, I’d had other things on my mind since then.

“Maybe I won’t bother,” I said. “To be frank, they look a bit weird, these things.”

“They’re supposed to be weird,” he replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Surely you’ve heard of ‘Poppets’ before?”

“Funnily enough, I don’t buy dolls very often.”

Purlock didn’t laugh, just pursed his lips. I got the feeling he’d been about to tell me something a little out of the ordinary, but suddenly lacked the heart for it. “That’s all it is really. A doll shop.”

Doll shop or not, there was something unsettling about those flat, emotionless visages regarding me through the mullioned glass.

“How can something that doesn’t have a face make you feel like it’s watching you?” I wondered.

“It’s part of the superstition,” he said. “There’s a witchcraft angle, if you’re interested.”

WHOLE STORY are now perusing my back-catalogue of short stories and novellas, so hopefully other titles will follow in this range. This blog is most definitely the place to tune in if you want more info on that. I’ll upload it as and when.

In other news this week, I’ve recently been interviewed by Robert McNeil of THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION, which is part of the Stirling University website. It was a lengthy, wide-ranging chat, covering lots of subjects, from my film work to my HECK novels to my TERROR TALES anthology series. Those interested, please feel free to pop along and have a read.

On the subject of movies, I was excited to see that WAR WOLF, the historical horror movie I’ve written for AMBER ENTERTAINMENT, has now been moved onto their pre-production schedule. We’re still at the finance-raising stage as we speak, but the signs are all good, and some exceptional people are now involved. Check out the link for further info – WAR WOLF is the fifth title down on the slate – but for what it’s worth, it is set during the Hundred Years War, and concerns a band of semi-lawless English knights who arouse the ire of an unspeakable foe in the wild forested regions of central southern France.

I’ve also been a bit more active on the short story front of late. As you’re probably sick of hearing me say, I love writing short fiction, but there isn’t much time for it at present. However, that doesn’t mean there’s no time, and thankfully I’ve managed to crank out a couple of short stories recently.

KRAMPUS is a Christmas-themed horror story, which has appeared in issue #10 of the Kindle genre magazine, K ZINE. No spoilers on that one, but if you buy you won't be disappointed. There is some exceptional speculative fiction in there.

The second bit of short story news concerns my new Sherlock Holmes novella, THE MONSTER OF HELL-GATE, which will be included in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES ABROAD, due to be published by Robinson next year (just be warned - the cover art posted here may not be the finished version, or even the same one that ends up being used). I must admit I had great fun with that one. Grisly murder mysteries on the wild, sun-bleached fringes of the Empire. What more could you ask for?

*

And now, sadly, I must depress the mood at little by reporting the death of that very fine author, Graham Joyce, who though he was only 59, passed away earlier this month after battling a long illness.

Graham, pictured right, was a personal friend of mine and something of a mentor. The very first time I attended a British Fantasy Society event in 1996, Graham was the first big name author to actually speak to me, and even though we’d only just met, he continued to chat with me throughout that weekend on the friendliest and most informal terms, a relationship we enjoyed ever after. Graham was an exquisite wordsmith, who though described as a fantasy author, always defied easy classification. He certainly wrote fantasy, but his gently philosophical work delved through the realms of mystery, science-fiction, magical realism and so forth, and was always instructive as well as hugely entertaining.

Together with Joel Lane, another Midlands-based author (and another good friend of mine), who we lost last year, Graham elevated genre fiction into the literary zone. He also produced a massive body of work, which if any of you haven’t yet discovered, you’d be well advised to go and look for. In fact, two masterly pieces of work, very illustrative of the talents that produced them, and perfect memorials in both cases, are Graham’s 25 YEARS IN THE WORD MINES, and Joel’s WHERE FURNACES BURN. If you don’t know the writing of Joel Lane and Graham Joyce, I urge you to seek these titles out as a start-point.

Both Joel and Graham will be massively missed, but at least, their talents live on in their amazing work, and that has to be something.